Microsoft employment soars

Without any fanfare, Microsoft updated the employee count on its Web page of corporate data Wednesday. The new numbers reflect a net addition of more than 10,000 people worldwide in the fiscal year ended June 30, bringing the total to 71,553. In raw figures, it’s the biggest annual increase in the company’s history.

No wonder it’s so hard to find a parking space on the Redmond campus these days.

The total increase is about twice what Microsoft was projecting at the beginning of the fiscal year. See this story for more on the reasons for the employment growth, the reaction from Washington state’s chief economist, and a much nicer graphic than my rudimentary one here.

To be clear, the percentage increase in employment has been larger in some past years, when Microsoft was growing from a smaller base of employees. But we looked at stats from the last decade and dug through Microsoft annual reports from the 1980s and early 1990s, and they confirmed that the annual growth in raw numbers is the biggest on record for the company. By comparison, Microsoft added 8,451 people in 2001, at the height of the tech boom.

My first thought upon seeing the numbers was to get a reaction from the anonymous Mini-Microsoft blogger — advocate of slimming down the company into “a lean, mean, efficient, customer-pleasing, profit-making machine.” So I sent him an e-mail, and he was nice enough to call. (He spoke on condition of anonymity, naturally, and for anyone who’s wondering, I didn’t recognize his voice as anyone I’ve talked with before. But I can say definitively that he’s not Steve Ballmer.) At any rate, this was his initial reaction when I told about the newly posted numbers: “Goodness gracious.”

Among other things, Mini Microsoft said he wondered how many of the new hires were software developers. (The company didn’t say.) He pointed out how difficult it can be to find talented developers, and he said he hoped the company wouldn’t lower the bar to get more people aboard. I have a hunch that Mini might be weighing in further on this topic in a blog post of his own.